But wait! We weren’t done!

Mary has got the bug. After our hot morning searching for spiders, I just wanted to kick back, take my shoes off, and cool down for a while. But nooooo…she had to drag me off to another local park to search for more. We visited Green River Park here in Morris, which has a lovely restroom that is thick with cobwebs (and also thick with squadrons of mosquitos waiting to lift off).

I charged into the men’s room, where I found this beautiful Steatoda borealis resting in a corner. I left her there, in case anyone wants to stop by and check her out.

[Read more…]

Fruits of our labors

As promised, we got out this morning to collect spiders. Our destination: West Side Park in Hancock, MN. We got a few. The prime hunting ground was a covered picnic area that had a metal frame with corrugated sheet metal walls that was great for the spiders, because they could hide in the spaces between the metal frame and the corrugated metal…unfortunately, it was bad for spider hunters, because they could hide a little too effectively.

Still, we managed to get a few more of our familiar friends, Parasteatoda:

[Read more…]

Friday Fun!

What are you doing for fun this weekend? This morning, the students and I are going out on a collecting trip — we’re going to drive outside of our survey area and just go nuts, prowling around bushes and buildings and parks, looking for novel spider species we hadn’t seen before, and scooping up all the P. tep we encounter to fill up our colony. We’ve got ten healthy egg sacs maturing in the incubator and a swarm of spiderlings to care for, but I’m a little bit paranoid because Winter Is Coming and I know the current bounty of diversity is going to die off fast. I also want to avoid last winter’s problem of a) the male shortage, and b) excessive inbreeding.

Besides, spiders are neat-o, right?

A recommendation: the people who made iNaturalist, the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society, have come out with a new app for your smartphone, Seek. It’s amazing. Point your phone camera at a tree, a leaf, an insect, anything, and it scans the live image and homes in on a species ID. It’s the most magical thing ever since my grad school days when I’d go for walks with Jim Kezer, an old-school herpetologist, who could give you the Latin binomial for any organism you showed him.

Try it, you’ll like it. It’s not quite as folksy and fun as Jim Kezer was, but it’s handy.

Anyway, we’re going to be out and about in the local small towns and parks, photographing and collecting spiders this morning. I hope your plans are as exciting.

Space spiders, prepare to land and conquer the planet

You know that batch of spiderlings I caught earlier? I had them in this container in my office, like so:

They’re all the little dots in there. Well, I decided I would set them free out in the garden, and I opened the container as you can see…while still in my office. They immediately became agitated and started scurrying about, and next thing I know, many of them have lifted off and started ballooning. I whipped out my camera and tried to get a photo, but tiny dots wafting through the air aren’t easy to photograph. Here’s a pair of them looking like spiders in space.

This is my favorite, though — it was drifting near the container, so it look like it’s about to land on Earth.

Most of them are outside now, but I’ve still got a few crawling on me, and every once in a while one floats across my field of vision. It’s magical!

Mary’s first macro photograph

We went on a spider walk around the house last night. I thought it would be interesting to see what the spiders do after the sun sets — I’ve read that the species I’m most interested in is more active at night — so we put on our head lamps and prowled about the house and garden in the dark, to see what we could see.

It’s a different world. We saw a cicada, and lots of moths (they liked our headlights), and crickets, and mosquitos, and flies, and mosquitos, and mosquitos, and mosquitos, and mosquitos, and mosquitos, and mosquitos. This was a perilous journey if you’re anemic or fear blood loss. We were there for the spiders, though.

Our house is already festooned with theridiidids, and we saw even more. Mary has been noticing an expansion of sheet webs down near the foundation, and had been wondering who was responsible, and they were out, these cute little grass spiders. They hang out in the space underneath our siding, and what we saw at night is that they’d half emerge. They stick out their head and legs from spaces in the wall, but keep their butts hidden away. They were very shy, and when we got close…thwip, they’d instantly dart back into their hidey holes.

Mary wanted to try out the photography thing, and discovered that it’s harder than it looks. You’ve got so little working space in front of the lens, and you’ve got to move the snout of the camera right up next to anything before you see more than a blur, and to focus, you physically move the camera forward and back until you get the little spider right in the plane of focus, and then you have to click the shutter, but on an unfamiliar camera you’ve forgotten where the shutter button is, so you look and find it, and then you have to find the spider again. Repeat until you have it momentarily in view, then click, click, click. She did a serviceable job on this little Parasteatoda, she just needs to practice a little more. Look at that, the hind leg is in perfectly sharp focus!

Photo by Mary Gjerness Myers

More practice and she’ll be as addicted as I am, and then the last voice of sensible restraint in our house will be browsing camera catalogs, and instead of food we’ll have all the lenses I could want, and a couple of new camera bodies, and overpriced image processing software, and…

The Spider Times

Word on the street in these here parts is that you should ignore the warmth and the sunshine and wake up to the fact that the weather is going to change. Spiders are smarter than humans that way.

Seriously…so many egg sacs are appearing all over the place. I think the spiders are instinctively preparing for the catastrophe that is a Minnesota winter, and also responding to the bumper crop of mosquitos and other insects that are swarming everywhere right now.

The students and I have plans for this week.

  • Tomorrow, we’re going to take advantage of the plethora of egg cases to do a staging exercise, opening them up and assessing the developmental stage of the embryos, referring to this paper: Mittman,B and Wolff, C (2012) Embryonic development and staging of the cobweb spider Parasteatoda tepidariorum C. L. Koch, 1841 (syn.: Achaearanea tepidariorum; Araneomorphae; Theridiidae). Dev Genes Evol (2012) 222:189–216. It’ll be great fun.
  • Thursday is Feeding Day. At 10:00 we’ll feed the adults crickets and flies, and all the babies will get a fly of their own. This is becoming a bigger job every week.
  • Friday…COLLECTING TRIP. We’re going to cruise out to some of the local towns, outside of where we’re doing our spider survey, and we’re going to go wild filling vials with Parasteatoda and their egg cases, because I’m having my own anxiety about winter, when I’ll lose access to the wild population again. My goal is to have so many spiders that they’re dribbling out of my ears. We especially need more males.